Speaking for the animals

A local workshop helped teach people how to get in touch with their pets.

By: Julie Gartland
   Communication is essential to our survival and we spend many hours trying to understand one another. But is it really necessary that we communicate with animals? Pets are wonderful companions but do we really need to understand them?
   These are questions you may ask yourself when you read about people claiming to communicate with animals as though they are Dr. Doolittle or Wilbur, the owner of the ’60s sitcom talking horse, Mr. Ed.
   Animal communicator, Irene Fetter, said she is the voice of the animals and she can teach people how to be in contact with them.
   At a recent workshop held at Nature’s Refuge in Jackson, Ms. Fetter spent the day teaching people how to connect with animals. People should open their minds to the availability of animals trying to communicate with them by using telepathy, she said.
   Lisa Handel, cofounder of Nature’s Refuge and organizer of the workshop, has had a few experiences communicating telepathically with animals. "Animals have a wealth of information to share with humanity and I think when people open their eyes and their hearts to their own inherent ability to do this, their attitude toward animals, toward each other, toward the environment will change, and hopefully raise to a higher consciousness level," she said.
   Ms. Fetter told the eight attendees, during a recent one day workshop, that they can shift the paradigm of time. "The future is now. Time bends. We can bring it into the present," she said.
   But thinking outside the box is not all that is required to benefit from the seminar. You must have an open mind.
   "If you’re not willing to entertain the thought of mental telepathy then we’re not going anywhere," said Ms. Fetter. "You have to be open to the availability of animals trying to communicate with us. If you can tap into these things you’ll be amazed where it’ll take you.
   "We’re all living beings and we share a life force. Life forces are collective thoughts and they can push through the barriers set up by our society and style of living to give us information," Ms. Fetter said.
   Lydia Marson-Polido of Toms River attended the workshop because she likes to be involved with anything new and interesting. Although she feels telepathy is not as difficult as some people make it out to be, she didn’t realize people could communicate with animals. "I thought that by just talking to my animals they understood everything I said. Now I know it’s more than the spoken word," she said.
   Ms. Fetter explained that communicating with animals requires developing strengths in four domains of consciousness: Optical, audio lingual, intuition, and sensorial.
   Don’t mistake communication to mean talking, warns Ms. Fetter. Talking to animals is a misconception. Animals communicate in pictures, not thoughts, she said.
   Ms. Fetter instructs the group to "see" in another way to develop their optical domain. Animals don’t understand English. They think in images and you have to communicate with them through visualizing what you want the animal to do.
   The easiest for people, but least frequently used by animals, is the audio lingual domain. This area focuses on complete attention to listening and speaking.
   Attention must be directed inward to develop the intuitive domain, Ms. Fetter said. Understanding and trusting your gut feelings and letting go of trying to "figure things out" by using your other senses will improve a person’s intuition.
   The final domain — sensorial — rests mostly within the heart with the focus on emotions. Vital to supporting this area, according to Ms. Fetter, is allowing yourself to feel what the animal is feeling.
   Identifying where you are strongest in these four areas and improving the field where you are weakest is the key to communicating with animals. When you develop all four domains, said Ms. Fetter, you will be less likely to miss the signals the animal is sending.
   Each member of the group had accounts of unexplained feelings or times of acute communication with animals that they were eager to share. Joseph Dewan of Jamesburg, owner of two dogs, two birds and numerous cats, said the workshop included "a lot of stuff I’ve picked up before but had thought it’s ridiculous. There was stuff I felt that was hard to explain."
   Ms. Fetter said that reinforcing the types of domains during the workshop gives people the confidence in their innate ability to communicate with animals.
   Pat Caplanson of Freehold attended the workshop because she was curious. Thinking it would help her understand her dogs better, she said she would try these methods but appeared skeptical. "I think they (the dogs) understand me more than I understand them."
   However, Ms. Caplanson, not discounting telepathy altogether, said she would definitely try the imaging technique with her boss in asking for a raise.
   Ms. Fetter understands the skeptic in people. She admits to being a skeptic herself. "I used to laugh at spiritual guides and stuff like this. I used to memorize the periodic table for fun. I believe in science. I’m very skeptical. I believe in things that make sense, so for me this is a stretch."
   Ms. Fetter, who lives in Pennsylvania, was trained in telepathy as a child. When she was 4-years-old her father would ask her to identify what color card he was holding or what letter he was thinking of.
   The great majority of the public have no room for this work, she said. "We’re not raised to believe in it. We can’t measure the intuitive response."
   Ms. Handel, a firm believer in holistic treatments, feels that people are usually wary of anything new. "Then you show them how to do it and they experience it for themselves and they’re like, okay this isn’t anything magical; this isn’t anything witchy," she said. "This is a gift that everybody is born with. Once people experience it for themselves they open up. There are ways of getting into that space where you can communicate with animals and when you get it, it changes your outlook."
For information on animal communication workshops contact Irene Fetter at (610) 328-1933 or via e-mail at [email protected].